During the 1970s and 1980s, Belgium and Italy accumulated huge amounts of public debt. In the early 1990s, at the time of the Maastricht Treaty, public debt reached a peak of nearly 140 percent of GDP in Belgium and nearly 130 percent in Italy. After Maastricht, both countries made major fiscal...

We investigate how university governance affects research output, measured by patenting and international university research rankings. For both European and U.S. universities, we generate several measures of autonomy, governance, and competition for research funding. We show that university...